Globalization
by Nitlon
Summary: Yes, we are terrible for each other, and yes, we are a disaster. But tell me your heart doesn't race for a hurricane or a burning building. I'd rather die terrified than live forever.  Axel, Roxas, and a war-torn AU.
1. Calm

A/N: Full disclosure, guys, I'm totally stealing the names of towns in Final Fantasy VI. I'm sure at times I look really weird to people near me because I open up the game, fly around until I see a town, land, go into the town to see the name of it, and then leave immediately and open up a word document. Oh God. I just realized that someone could be like, a seat behind me and totally reading this. I'm...I'm going to write with seven-point font from now on.

* * *

"He that would travel happily must travel light."  
- **Antoine de Saint-Exupery**

* * *

It could be worse. There are carpet slaves. There are tiny catatonic children whose tiny fingers fit together tiny machine parts. They stare blankly at walls all day, and their daydreams don't stretch beyond waiting for their six hours of time allotted for sleep before they have to wake up and do it again.

Roxas knows that. He's been preached at by books and other kids his age. But just because some have it worse doesn't mean that Sable doesn't have it bad, and him especially.

It's an arid, sandy place right on the edge of the desert. The plants are seeded in neat rows along irrigation canals (thank God for Espers), and as far as real estate goes, it's pretty cheap. Cheaper, now, probably.

He loves it because he doesn't know anywhere else, because he doesn't know any better; trucks go through sometimes, big, clunking, military things. Nothing to worry about. The only thing to worry about is getting lost, being swallowed up by the dunes and having the old airship not spot you and your blond hair until too late.

In Sable, you wear black and white. It's not a rule, but you do it. In the day, the only thing that stands out in the sand is black; at night, it's the faint glow of the moon on white fabric. Fingers are painted, or even tattooed - black on the front and white on the back, in case you need to sign something across a field. You wear black and white, you ignore the looks of strangers passing through. It's so practical, just here in this place, when standing out is a necessity and letting go is just as much.

The soldiers began to build their base one day, about three kilometers away from his house. Giant trucks carted in Magitek armor and funny metal rods and stacks upon stacks upon stacks of uniforms his mom calls 'olive-colored'. "It's a plant," she explains, when he tells her olive is just a kind of oil, "The oil comes from the fruit – at least, I think it's a fruit. I've never heard of salty fruit, though."

And in typical fashion for Roxas's mother, she goes off to look it up in one of her three dozen field guides, or two sets of encyclopedias.

He just stays and watches the trucks. He wonders what's so important, that they have men with guns and weary eyes standing around all of their things.

* * *

Slowly, over a period of months, a tower is erected in the sand. It doesn't seem very militaristic to Roxas – it's quite square, and metal, and has little buildings all around it for food or laboratories or whatever. Certainly no barracks or anything like the rumors which carried in the wind.

And he was nearly a grown man, by Sable's definition of it, but he couldn't bury the urge to creep closer to the tower and the people inside of it. He wanted to know what they were doing to his desert, to the lonely expanse of sand he loved. Why it was necessary to look out his window and see this hulking black shadow when nobody had told them anything. Who these people were, that they were allowed to bark and shout and march.

It's just curiosity at first – there's no malice or suspicion in what he's doing.

He goes right up to the fence, hooking his harlequin fingers into the loops of metal, but he can't see anything from here. There's a five-foot tall wall of concrete right in front of him that trucks disappear behind. Never one to give up in the face of a simple problem, Roxas grasps the fence higher and pulls himself up, hitching his toes on the squares. Cruel and generous swathes of barbed wire are positioned a few inches from his head, but he couldn't care less – he's got farmer hands, rough and calloused.

A big man, with muscles on his arms Roxas could only dream of having, marches by not twenty feet away, followed by a dozen troops. He's bald, but his men don't seem to have been forced to adhere to the same code. Most have reasonable hair, messy and around their ears. A few have it longer, and up in ponytails, including one redhead. But they all walk the same, holding boxes of supplies.

Suddenly their leader spots Roxas, his beady eyes narrowing, and he turns to shout.

"Where's your uniform, soldier?"

Roxas looks down. A black shirt and shorts, and striped sleeve and leg attachments, since he'd just come from the far end of the field (it was a good precaution if you got lost in the dunes). "I'm wearing my uniform," he replies eventually.

"Tch!" Mr. Sergeant (what rank was sergeant? He'd only read it in books) barks. "You ain't one of my boys, are ya?"

By now he's started walking over here, so Roxas hops off his perch and plants his feet on the ground, a couple feet from the fence. Mr. Sergeant's troops follow him, resting heavy packages on their hips. This close he seems even bigger, and sweatier, and balder.

"N-no sir," Roxas hears himself stammer.

A grin. "Yeah, not with that physique you aren't. So where'd you come from, you little shit?" He says 'little shit' fondly for some reason.

Roxas almost can't understand his question. Where did he _come_ from? He was here before them! He'd stood where he's standing now, and looked out at nothing but sand blown into ever-moving hills by the wind. But he only shakes his head, and points back to Sable. "From the town a way's over there. We're pretty big, we've got almost two thousand people – "

"Town?" Mr. Sergeant frowns, grinding his square jaw, and looks at the redhead with the ponytail. "There a village over there?"

"Yea- yessir," says the soldier. "Sable. Pretty basic farming community."

What a curt way to describe the place that had been home to every facet of Roxas's existence. A 'pretty basic farming community'. Well, they'd constructed a 'pretty boring military facility.' Mr. Sergeant snorts, and checks the pocket watch hooked onto his thick belt. "Guess I did see somethin' over there when I rode in," he muttered. "I thought we were supposed to find an isolated place?"

Roxas has always thought the Empire's soldiers would be a lot less...forthcoming. And a lot more...informed. But then, he supposes it could just as easily be only this clueless bastard who was giving them all a bad name.

It's the redhead who replies again. Maybe he's Mr. Sergeant's right-hand man; maybe the others are just too shy. "Headquarters did the best they could on such short notice," he says. "Nowhere else was far enough in the desert, but still reasonably close to the transport roads." There's a heavy pause in the air, as if the soldier has decided last-minute not to say something.

Roxas scrutinizes this man, who keeps his eyes on his leader and nowhere else. His hair sticks out everywhere past his ponytail, squashed down by his military-issue hat. Roxas thinks to himself in passing that he'd like to see how big this man's hair would get without a ponytail, and wonders why someone with such a distinctive head speaks so proper.

"So, what," Mr. Sergeant continues at length, "That tightass is just fine with a couple thousand hicks as spectators?"

What follows is nothing like the silence that comes during hours of rerouting irrigation hoses two feet away from your friend, both of you too hot to waste energy talking, and it's nothing like the silence of walking back with him when you're both tired and satisfied and quietly congratulatory. It's heavy, and the redhead's eyes flicker briefly from Roxas back to his sergeant, waiting.

"Hn," the bald man says. He turns to Roxas, now, his grey eyes narrowed. "I'm thinkin' you don't much recall what we discussed, yeah?"

"Yessir," he slurred. Having that gaze locked so coolly on him made Roxas's spine feel like jelly. He would do just about anything to deflect it.

"It's not that we're hiding anythin'," Mr. Sergeant takes a step closer to the fence. "But you know how sensitive people get about this government stuff. Conspiracy this, cover-up that – nobody wants to think a boring ol' base is just a base."

"No, yeah, I get it," Roxas says. "I understand. I won't talk, or anything."

"Nothing to talk about," is the smooth reply. "Just don't go spreadin' unnecessary rumors. That's the sort've thing liable to make your uppity military types real unhappy."

The blond nods furiously, taking a step further back. Mr. Sergeant laughs at him, then walks forward, grabbing the fence and rattling it. _Crash!_ Roxas stumbles and runs away as fast as his jelly legs will take him, away from the mysterious military base and around the nearest dune he can manage, zig-zagging back through the hot desert, and doesn't slow down until he can see his house.

The bald man snorts, and motions with his head to the small group of soldiers to continue with their work. "Shouldn't've happened," he mutters, almost to himself. "Damn but that shouldn't've happened. HQ'll be up in my ass if they find out." He glanced at the redhead, pursing his thin lips. "How'd that kid get all the way up here, anyway? I thought I said to post a hundred fifty Magiteks patrollin' the perimeter at all times."

"You did. They are."

"_Well_?"

"I don't know, sir." The 'sir' almost seems an afterthought. "He's a native. They know the terrain better."

"Then _double_ the fucking _guard_." The sergeant sneered and stomped back inside, his subordinates following. "Have to do fuckin' everything. HQ's trainin' the fucking initiative out of you people."

* * *

Roxas has not been raised on picture books, or fairytales, or fantasies. Myths aplenty – he can recite two dozen different origins for the world, name a hundred gods of everything from thunder to laundry – but happy endings have never really caught on in his house, because his mother is far too sensible for that sort of thing.

She's not very talkative – doesn't cram information down his throat – but perhaps Roxas's parents raised him with an inevitable wanderlust. It has seeped in, osmotically, and is far too deep in his skin ever to be removed at this point.

So when he does get home, fearful that Mr. Sergeant has changed his mind and is thundering through the sand behind him with a sword, he just goes up to his room and sits down on his bed. He's almost eighteen; he doesn't need to go tell his dad everything that happens to him. He takes off the striped attachments and changes into a white shirt to try and lessen the heat, glancing out the window. "Bah! Weather tomorrow? Same as yesterday! And the day before that...and the day before that..." he grouses in a poor mimicry of his grandfather.

Desert sunsets are completely amazing. Nothing gets in the way of them, not mountains, not trees, not houses. They trail orange lace across the sky and spill violet over everything you touch.

Perhaps Roxas is naive, but he honestly doesn't suspect that base of anything but what they've said – building a base, for supplies, and strategic vantage points and all, and maybe experimentation. It isn't his fault. He hasn't been lied to nearly enough, and he's only a boy, as the newly-married men like to loudly inform him.

He's got nightshift today, and probably for something frustrating, like herding chocobos. He's never taken too kindly to the animals on the plantations, if only because they have never taken too kindly to him (which for Roxas, more often than not, translates to "your head is in the way of my spit"). Instead he favors the late evening, patrolling the massive herb gardens with nothing but a lantern and his own quiet footsteps to chase away overly curious Maligas.

But he keeps on being drawn to his window to that tall black pillar, to the construction going on behind it, the flashes of bright hair in between gunmetal and khaki. It's not like he's a terribly adventurous boy, and he hasn't got any aspirations of heroism, but damn if he isn't curious.

Still, years of being an obedient child stop him from sneaking back to the fence. After all, if there is one thing Roxas doesn't want to be, it's an inconvenience. He has been raised with a love for myths and the lesson that if you can't do something useful, you'd better not keep other people from doing so. When his mother calls him down with a loud "Roxas, your friends are here! Don't forget your matches, sweetie, you're on herding duty tonight!" he dismisses the thoughts from his head, shrugging on a white tunic with long sleeves and his tall boots. It's very cold in the desert at night; the people of Sable have made the quick adjustment to changing temperatures an absolute art.

When he gets outside, waving goodbye to his mom, Roxas learns from Hayner that he is indeed herding a small army of juvenile chocobos around to stretch their legs, whereas Hayner and Olette get to share greenhouse duty.

"Are you _kidding_ me?" he cries, punching Hayner on the shoulder. "This is like my _nightmare_."

On his other side, Olette tugs on his black hood. "Don't complain," she says, raising her eyebrows. "I had herding duty three nights in a row last month and I bore it with a grin."

Roxas rolls his eyes and starts walking backwards to face the two of them at once. "That's because you're nuts," he says simply. "Have you ever looked into the eyes of a chocobo? They're evil. They are stupid empty vessels of evil, and I have to herd around juveniles, which are the worst ever."

Hayner laughs, and makes a retort about how if stupid things are evil, Roxas is a demon king. "Besides," he says, heading for the warm safety of the greenhouse, "You get to walk around all alone at night. You love mopey shit like that."

* * *

Contrary to Hayner's perception, Roxas does not, in fact, love shit like that. But he could see how his best friend could make the mistake – when he has a night off, Roxas frequently spends it walking around the dunes, just close enough to the edge of Sable not to be hopelessly lost. This is purely because it helps him think. Farming, especially on a plantation, is not the most intellectually involved of jobs, but he's always found it hard to think properly when he's checking plants for parasites or obsessively weeding. Best to have nothing but his feet going.

Besides, you're not really _alone_ at night when you've got forty chocobos of perfect, face-eating height you're meant to be taking on a walk.

The only way to get a herd of chocobos to move is by convincing them that another one knows where it's going. The inherent problem being, of course, that no one chocobo is ever willing to take the initiative, which means Roxas has to resort to pulling one a few feet in a particular direction, then having them all follow and stand around aimlessly while he encouraged the stragglers.

"Come on, pretty girl," he coos. This particular one has been giving him trouble all night. He is entirely convinced that she was, at some point, secretly lobotomized. At the moment the thing is staring off in a completely different direction than the rest of them, with one beady eye set on him and her head cocked bizarrely. "Come on. This way. Come get your friends."

She grinds her beak and blinks. "Great. This is just _awesome_." Then, in that same cooing, placating voice, "You're an idiot! Who's an idiot? You are! You don't have the common sense the gods gave cabbage, isn't that right, pretty bird?" This yields about the same reaction, at which point Roxas loses all pretence of patience and just smacks her between the wings.

"_Brawk!_" she screeches, bounding away from him. She runs right into the rest of the herd, jostling all of them into jogging forward a few long-legged paces. Roxas stands there for a moment, eyes shut tight to the sand being blown into his face, wondering if there's really anything in the head of a chocobo besides tuneless whistling and vague cartoon sound effects.

"Just. _Awesome_," he repeats.

* * *

Axel can catch a fish with his hands and fold all of the origami patterns on the 'expert' level of the book Demyx gave him. He can do card tricks, and give awesome back massages, and was placed in the top fifteen percent of his graduating regiment, so he really and truly doesn't understand why he can never get his Magitek armor to work right. Ever.

The huge machine lurches forward and stops, slamming him against the controls. His hip bumps a lever or pushes a button or something and a bolt of blue electricity is shot into a nearby dune. It's absorbed, curiously; the singed hole immediately caves in on itself and the dune is a dune once again. "Join the army!" he mutters to himself. "Waste resources and do stupid things on a larger scale and at the expense of the government!"

Glowing words scroll across the control panel: _Warning shot fired. Proceed with auto-target system?_

"Auto-targeting what?" he asks it, looking around. He's a good ten feet off the ground with the suit, and extends the legs as far up as they could to see past the dune he'd shot. Nothing there, not even far off.

_Proceeding with auto-target system._ The energy canon in the belly of the beast swivels menacingly around with that funny mechanical whirring. "Fuck fuck fuck _fuck fuck fuck_!" he shouts, looking around desperately for whatever would cancel the shot; a big red button, surely, or a switch marked "undo", or _anything_, really. He hates this default program. He hates being put into giant machinery legs, instead of walking around on his own two feet with night-vision goggles and a big gun with no commands or switches or glowing text. This is just _ridiculous_.

"It's like a mouse or something, isn't it? What're you gonna do, cast Ultima on a freakin' _mouse_?" He kicks his seat and hopes there aren't any pedals or something under there. Just watch there be the speed dial and he goes crashing into the base.

It's still set to electricity, and _BZZT_ goes another shot, illuminating the darkness.

And instead of the death squeak of a helpless desert mouse, the sound of spluttering and somebody falling over with an alarmingly human _thud_ in the sand.

"Oh gods. I killed somebody." Axel blinks a few times and cranks up the brightness on the Magitek armor's single headlight. "Hello?"

"Let that be a warning, birds!"

"What?"

"Do not cross me! I will – send – magical sideways bolts of lightning at your asses with my thoughts! Apparently!"

"_Excuse_ me?"

"What."

"What?"

Swinging around the control shaft, Axel waves the headlight back and forth across the sand, up and down and across rows of fuzzy yellow heads. What are those? He's seen them on farms and pulling carts, and a few generals have ridden them during formal ceremonies. It really is a different world, all the way out here. He supposes.

And then the light finds this boy, this _kid_, really, in some funny-looking old shirt and boots and it illuminates the slickness of his hair, his sweating face and wide eyes. A thin chest hyperventilates, the thin linen of his clothes undulating with it. "Oh – oh God," the boy stammers, his pupils shrinking to a fraction of their size in the bright beam. "I'm so sorry I'm sorry I am, I'll go now, I'm sorry, I promise I didn't – "

"It's okay, it's _fine_, sheesh." Axel runs on his autopilot of Kohlingen hospitality. One must assuage those who feel unwelcome, simply on principal. It doesn't occur to him that this boy really _isn't_ welcome here, which is funny, because Axel's had no problem shooing away the nosy wives and the fathers with their young children pointing out the big trucks. Maybe only that this one is so quick to assume he is not wanted.

He swivels the light away, points it at the ground, and for the first time notices the dull pulsing glow of the lantern the kid's holding. It's so faint. How can he see in such dim light?

"Um." Fiddling with a thin black string tied around his neck, the boy stares at him endlessly. "No offense, but I don't really think it _is_, see. See I was here before and they told me to go away because I was going to get in trouble for it."

It's horribly cold in this desert at night. The whole thing is on this long strip of land connecting the two northern continents. It's flanked on either side by mountains and angry oceans which take away all of the heat when there's no sun to accumulate. Axel wears gloves with the fingertips cut off to operate machinery.

"Hey, you live around here, right?"

"...well, yeah. You stupid _chanka_!" There's a dull thud.

"Sorry?"

"Not you, the bird. Why do you care where I live?"

"How often does it rain?" Axel asks him earnestly, glancing up at the brilliant sky with more stars than he's ever seen in any Kohlingen forests or the high plains of the Veldt. There's nothing to get in the way here, he supposes. He starts to finger the little pocket watch around his neck absentmindedly.

"I dunno. Once, maybe twice a season. It snowed, once," the kid adds, looking up at the sky with him.

"Really? It snowed?"

"Yeah. It was at night. And it gets cold at night – colder than this a lot – and it was raining and the rain froze up there and fell down here and – and it snowed. It was so _weird_. You know?" He doesn't look at Axel the whole time he's talking.

Axel stares at him again, at the dim flickering light and the herd of birds behind it, sketched in the vague feathers outlined by the flame. "Not really. But you're fine here. Just don't go past this point. We're guarding the perimeter, to keep civilians from getting too close –could be dangerous – and there's some rule says if a civilian finds out too much from being past here we have to arrest them and interrogate them for a day." He opens the watch, snaps it shut again, and then opens it. He doesn't look at the time. "You can tell people that bit if you want. That it's an official rule. It's a law and shit. Scare off yer stupid friends."

The kid doesn't speak, but takes a step backwards and slightly to the side, so he's standing right next to one of the birds. Nervously, he touches its flank and stands one toe on its tips, as if he's getting ready to mount it and gallop off at top speed. The birds don't look big enough for it, not quite.

"Whoa, hey," Axel says. "Hey, you don't have to be afraid. The bolt was an accident – I mean this thing is practically the destroyer of worlds here. As soon as it sees something alive it tries to shoot it down."

"That's...that's really comforting," he replies, a dryness to his tone making Axel stifle a laugh.

"So you're a native? I'm St- I'm Axel. I'm a private."

"Roxas," Roxas says, fumbling a bottle out of the bag tied to his belt loop. He takes a little too much time unscrewing the cap. "Private is an adjective." Staring at the bottle, he swishes the liquid around once or twice before taking a sip.

"What? No, no, I'm _a _private."

"You're a private person," he mutters. "Not a private. If you keep talking funny nobody will understand what you're saying."

"A private is a military rank," Axel says gently. He keeps his eyes trained on Roxas, waiting to make eye contact again.

Roxas does. He stares up at Axel with those same wide eyes, and there it is again, that something afraid apologizing for its own existence. "Oh. I'm, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you, sir – "

Axel shrugs. "Mistakes are how I learn everything. Nothin' to apologize for. But really, how long've you lived around here?"

"Around – a-around in the desert?" He hasn't blinked once in the last thirty seconds, just staring. "All the time." His lips pursed so tight they turn white, Roxas screws the cap back on the bottle and clears his throat. "Forever."

Now, Axel knows for an absolute fact that these people had been living in deserts since before the army even got organized. The natives in the deserts are allowed to go undisturbed, and for obvious reasons. Nobody else wants to live here. There are no battles over land nobody can use.

He's heard, from other teams, vets of different missions, that the desert folk are disturbingly peaceful. Simple. Just not simple-minded. They say that these people will let things go that the forest tribes get all uppity about, tolerate breaks in tradition or loud insults to them and their way of life. It must, Axel reasons, have something to do with the sand. Sand probably erodes everything. The dunes are always changing. The people are used to it, then.

Axel looks back at the army base and swallows.

"You guys must be pretty isolated," he offers, setting his eyes on Roxas again.

The bird next to him shifts, and Roxas turns to it and starts to smooth down its feathers. "Suppose so," he says. "We certainly don't get many visitors, though a few people make a book trip once every couple of months. We may not know much of politics, but we're not stupid."

Roxas seems to give this idea some thought, staring off into space. "According to my parents, we even bothered to learn your language. Just to prove to you that we were your equals. Over a hundred years ago, of course, so understand I'm not accusing you of anything."

"Right," Axel says. "Of course not." He tightens his hand on the movement lever. "Do you speak two languages, then?"

"Yes."

"What's the other one called?"

Roxas says something slippery and resonant with too many syllables for Axel to remember. Instead of repeating it, he just tells him, "Pretty."

"I think so." The kid smoothes down his shirt self-consciously, then glances up at what Axel imagines is a terrifying sight from down there. "I – it's probably – it's probably late by now. I'm sorry I – imposed – "

A quick flip of his watch confirms the time. "Good seven, eight hours till sunrise," he interrupts. "Not too late by military standards, but I guess you guys operate differently."

"Why is there a watch around your neck?" It's the first time Roxas has spoken to his face without stuttering. And suddenly something in Axel finds those eyes not pitiful, but enthralling. It is fantastic to have them on him and nowhere else.

"To...remind me, I guess," is his stupid reply.

"Remind you of the time?" He cocks his head to the side and sniffs a little, but his voice is still calm.

"Not really. More – the ticking. It reminds me that nothing ever stops." He looks down at his hands, splayed across the control panel. "Not life. Not the world. Not anything."

There's a long silence. Axel knows it sounds stupid. He knows it sounds really, terribly juvenile, especially when he's got no real reason to think this way, and waits for the embarrassment to settle in and his temper to flair up defensively. The night, and the machine, and the boy, have made him uninhibited. Misguidedly so.

"Alright," Roxas says.

And then the funny thing. He doesn't shift awkwardly on his feet and say "Well..." or prevaricate. Roxas just nods at nothing in particular and then turns around, making his way through the flock of flightless birds to the back of the herd, tugging on the neck of one and walking forwards. They follow him, somewhat reluctantly, though a few remain to stare at Axel inquisitively without blinking.

"Oy!" comes the shout from the front of the herd, and even these, too, run to join him.

No goodbye.

Axel doesn't understand what's happened, naturally, and takes a good deal of offense at this hasty and rude departure. In Kohlingen, leaving without saying goodbye means you've been hurt. In Sable, it is a promise to speak again soon. It is a promise that you want to.

* * *

A/N: Um. Review, I guess? If you don't have anything to say then, uh...write a...haiku.


	2. Before the

A/N: Okay. Listen. Fuck this coy shit. I refuse to spend fifty thousand words sitting around slowly tiptoeing up to the very maybe idea of kind of a little bit considering reconsidering your stance on your possible bisexuality.

Fun story: this fic is my favorite because it has the least views of anything I've ever written, including fandoms I literally can't remember the names of. I normally can't be assed to talk about page views, because I don't really care, but I feel about this story the way I feel about ugly little brown fish. They're cute but nobody else wants them so they're all mine.

Also this chapter has schizophrenic personalities, I feel like. I apologize for that. But...hey. Like everything I'm currently writing, I'm kind of banking on nobody reading it anyways.

* * *

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insiduously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to seperate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?  
**- Aleksander Solzhenitsyn**, _The Gulag Archipelago_

* * *

Morning comes, and Roxas is up with the sun the way he always is. A quietness drifts over Sable, the holy period of early when the sky groans with effort. It's a respectful silence, and Roxas slips on his boots and his fuzzy black pants to go outside and bask in it.

A time of few words, the early morning.

"Good morning, sky," he says. "Good morning, sand. Good morning, tower."

He's got school for almost five hours straight off, followed by enough scouting duty to last him until nightfall. It isn't often that a longer school shift and afternoon farm work fall back to back on the same day, but it happens.

"Man," he mutters to himself. "Sable just _hates_ me today."

But, as always, he laughs and tells himself that days are all the same length, good or bad. And this one will end just as soon as a good one will.

* * *

Midway to afternoon, Hayner collapses next to Roxas, leaning against the school building to face that tower.

"Hi," Roxas says. "Where are the, um." Yawns. "The other ones."

"Pence's got a messed-up schedule right now," Hayner frowns. "Got little-kid duty today, or something. Olette's just...probably talking to a teacher because she got a four on a paper or something." Hayner likes to add 'or something' to his sentences, as if covering his tracks, accounting for the whole world in two words.

Roxas laughs, because Olette swims in fives, the highest of six possible grades in the humanities, and anything less is an insult to her intelligence. He's got a handful in his life, never corresponding to the amount of work he puts in, but no huge amount. Fours like the rest of them.

"I know. It's like grades are the only thing she cares about. I don't know why." He frowns. "They don't really count for anything, do they?" It is, of course, hard to keep from getting caught up with her torrent of worry and grades – he's always been prey to these sorts of things. If someone is doing something important, it **_be_ **important, in some way or another. He's been taught to think otherwise – believes otherwise – but putting it into practice always proves harder.

"I guess not. They don't matter if you stay in Sable. As long as you try, and don't slack off – I mean as long as you do the work – nobody gives a shit." He takes lunch out of his bag, a leafy sandwich on brown bread, wrapped in a thick sheet of paper. "Aw, seriously? I'm not a _llama_. I need _starch_ or something, Mom."

"There's starch in bread, I thought."

"Shut up." Hayner plucks a leaf hanging off the side. "Would you want to eat this? This is so _gorram_ unsatisfying."

Roxas shrugs, because he has beans and flavored rice and is quite happy with it, and offers some to Hayner. "I wouldn't eat all of it anyway. I'll eat some of your sandwich."

"Deal." Hayner mercilessly tears it in half, squishing the bread between his fingers in a few places, offering it to Roxas. He takes a savage bite of his half. "Hey, d'you know what's up with that tower?"

"Not more than anyone else. Some Empire thing, I guess," he frowns and tips his cup towards Hayner, who takes a sloppy spoonful of beans. "I met one of their soldiers yesterday, though."

"_Seriously_? Really? What was he like?"

All Roxas can respond with is a shrug. "Normal, I guess. He asked me some questions about Sable. To be honest, I don't remember it that well. It was only a few minutes 'cause he was patrolling and I was kind of scared, so I left." At this Hayner makes an utterly disgusted noise, a groan of "Aww, Rox-_as_, I would _kill_ to talk to one of those guys!"

"They're not allowed to tell us anything anyways. I think like as a matter of policy. You know, since if they told us the not-scary stuff and didn't tell us the scary stuff, we'd always know when they were up to something bad because they wouldn't say anything. I mean. I mean it's obvious they're not actually gonna do anything."

"Yeah." Still, Hayner twists his mouth to the side, wiggles his toes in the sand. What a dumbass, wearing sandals in the midday sun, Roxas privately laughs to himself, loving his friend for his carelessness. "I heard they set up more or less the same thing in the Veldt somewhere. For training soldiers in harsh conditions."

"What's harsh about the Veldt? I thought it was grassland?"

Hayner snorts. "Ain't a monster alive that doesn't frequent the Veldt. It's like the scary thing clubhouse."

"Oh." With no reply for that, Roxas just turns to quietly eating his lunch. Hayner is probably exaggerating about the Veldt, he thinks, because that's what Hayner does. Everything has to be more exciting than it really is. If there is one boy in Sable who deserves an adventure, it's Roxas's best friend. Hayner is always going a little farther from Sable than he went yesterday, expanding his radius of desert inch by inch until it'll encompass the whole world and him in it, spinning around a little desert city. Hayner running around his playground turning over rocks and digging holes in the sand to see if he'll discover a monster he can fight. Of course Hayner wants to meet a soldier, and see what they're doing in the tower – he's never been satisfied with Just Because.

Roxas envies him for that.

"Hey, Roxas?" his voice has shrunk to a fraction of its volume, quiet and controlled.

"Yeah?"

"D'you like Olette?"

There's a funny hiccup in his voice that Roxas doesn't recognize. "Olette? Yeah, I like her well enough, why?"

"No, no I mean – do you _like_ her."

Roxas blinks and raises his eyebrows, suddenly aware that he was treading on very shaky ground. "Romantically? No..."

"Really?" Hayner asks, leaning forward a little and still chewing on a piece of lettuce. "Are you sure?"

Rolling his eyes, Roxas shoves him in the chest. "No. I'm totally messing with you. I'm in love with Olette and we're going to elope to Kohlingen and have _four thousand babies_."

Hayner is silent for a moment, and then says "Thirty-seven years."

"What?"

"If Olette had a baby every nine months, it would take you thirty-seven years to get four thousand babies, except I think she'd run out of eggs."

"You – did you just do that in your head?" Roxas asks incredulously. "I mean that's a disgusting thought but did you just do the math in your head?"

"Yup!" Hayner crows, suddenly bright and cheerful again. "I am a super amazing fantastic dude like that. 'Sides, big numbers are still easier than writing."

It was true that writing has never been easy for either of them. Roxas can't get his words to come out the way he wants, and Hayner never has anything to say – they feel a sort of camaraderie there. But Roxas has always taken to Sable's native language better than Hayner, who calls it "clunky and funny-sounding".

"_Tian chanka bunlabu,_" he says with a grin, nudging Hayner's foot.

"The fuck?"

"You're a very cute airhead," Roxas says. "I was going through my dictionary the other day and found it."

Hayner scowls at him and crosses his arms. "_Dana, tian chanka_ fucktarded."

"That...doesn't make sense in either language."

"Why? What did I say?"

"'Well, you're a fucktarded airhead.' Isn't that a little redundant? And...offensive?"

"It's exactly what I meant to say and I mean every word of it, including the incorrectly pronounced ones."

He likes this, laughing with his best friend, just being there and spoken to and wanted, he likes it. He's childish, really. Roxas dislikes complications, but he loves stories. He loves good and evil, especially when the lines are blurry – or better yet, when the lines are clear and they are crossed by both parties. He loves stories of tricksters, because every culture has one, and stories where monsters and heroes have real conversations instead of fighting each other. Because it's Sable, and they teach their kids different than they do in Kohlingen or Figaro.

"Hey – Hayner?" Roxas asks.

"What?"

"Why'd you ask me that, about Olette?"

Hayner bristles and looks at him sideways. "No reason."

"You can tell me, can't you?"

He just shakes his head, rolls his eyes and looks at the sand, pulling it between his fingers over and over again. "It doesn't matter. As long as you don't like her I don't really care." Roxas gives him a shove and takes another bite of food, which he's nearly forgotten is there. Why is Hayner acting like this? Roxas racks his brain for their recent interactions, him and Hayner, him and Olette, all three of them. Yesterday can't have been it; they've had that conversation a thousand times. The day before they'd all been working on a humanities project, and he doesn't remember anything weird about that, either. The only possibility he can think of dawns on him slowly.

"Is this about what I told you?" he says, eyes narrowed.

"Huh?" Hayner finally looks him in the eyes. "What did you tell me?"

"I mean it, Hayner."

"So do I!"

"That – last week, when I told you about me – you know, maybe not...liking girls as much as I should, was that – " he cuts himself off, not even wanting to finish the thought, and hating himself a little for jumping to this conclusion so quickly. It occurs to him that Hayner could very well like Olette and is just making sure the way is clear before pursuing her, and he feels like a jerk. "Or do you like Olette?"

"That's not it," Hayner says.

"Then what? Were you making fun of me?"

"No. Jeez, Roxas! I just wanted to ask you something but then we got sorta sidetracked!" Clapping him on the shoulder, Hayner laughs so hard a little bit of lettuce comes out of his mouth, and he wipes his face on his sleeve.

"Oh. What is it?"

There is a long, long silence during which Roxas can't get a single coherent thought through his head. Every time he tries, he turns back to what Hayner's about to say. "...well, now it feels weird," is what finally comes out of his best friend's mouth.

"Please, just tell me."

But they've been out here for too long, and someone inside is hitting the gong with slow, sure strokes. Roxas tries never to be late, but wonders if this isn't worth the exception.

"I just think I might – I think...the same as you...I might be –"

"Oh! _Oh_."

That's all they really need to say. It certainly seems to satisfy Hayner, who looks immensely relieved, although Roxas hadn't noticed him looking stressed. In the thirty seconds before they head back inside, there is a funny silence, a question, and an answer.

"Can I kiss you?"

"Yeah."

So Hayner does, and Roxas is mostly still for it, and it's over in a second and they head back inside and Roxas touches his lips and can't remember how it feels.

* * *

If you asked the nation state of Tzen, in the beginning, there was one. A point on a plane, composed not of matter, but only a specific location. The Origin, or sometimes translated as Order depending on the text – Roxas once asked a Tzenian passing through, who told him that there wasn't really a good translation for it in the Empire's official language, nor in Sable's.

In the beginning, there was calm. One. Order.

He exploded.

And rushing out came everything, with light leading the way. The everything sped around the void, and filled it up. Order, still in the center, was frightened, and huddled in on himself. He grabbed what he could see, and put it all into a pile, and shaped it as well as he could and kept it together with his power, and so the world came. But Chaos, who had been birthed, was jealous of the world and determined to bring pandemonium to it. In Tzen lore, the whole world was a battlefield for Order and Chaos. Chaos was more powerful, and was always winning, but Order was cunning and true and held his own.

The Tzenian Roxas has met, a thin man with long dark hair who declined to give his name, was reluctant to assign genders to them. He said that in his language, they were neither, and stressed upon this fact when he told Roxas the next part of the story. Order and Chaos had a child ("You see now, little one, two men cannot have a child, but they were neither of them men..."), the first human. Humans, he said, were ordered things with careful inner workings who strove for peace and calm. But he went on to say that they were never satisfied with monotony, that tearing things apart came easier to them than putting them back together no matter how they fought the urge, and fought for Order and Chaos at the same time. ("We do not dissipate into our component parts to whiz around the void, you see. Order fights Chaos for this every day, but still we do the work of Chaos. How many stories end in tragedy? There are more ways to kill than to heal, little one, oh, little one, how I like your little town.")

Sable has a very different answer for where men come from. Like any modern town, they say real answer lies in science, but their lore dictates simplicity: the wind blew the sand into the shape of a life by chance, and the monsoons gave it a mind, and it propagated. Roxas likes the Tzen lore. To him, it makes a better story. As a small child, his favorite pictures had been the ones of Order and Chaos because they looked like people, and didn't have lots of arms and legs and faces, and their magic never glowed – though that might have been the limitation of the artists.

Roxas groans at his desk and begins to think that Chaos is winning and that he is starting with Roxas's stomach, which is slowly evaporating.

He wants someone to ask if he's alright, but can't very well talk to Olette or Pence about something like this. He's riding flurries of emotions he hadn't known he had. He is excited, of course, but is it excitement about Hayner or excitement about the idea of the thing? And at the same time, he hates the idea, the principle of the thing.

_If you have fifty loves, you will have fifty woes. If you have no loves, you will have no woes_.

He breathes in and out, very slowly and carefully. When he tries to look up at the chalk board he can't make sense of any of the symbols, and buries his head in his hands again. He needs to go find someone who knows things, and he won't find anyone here.

* * *

Little boys aren't allowed in military bases. Especially foreign little boys. Nasty blue-eyed little monsters with sticky fingers and slippery accents, wickedly beautiful farm equipment strapped to their backs. But Axel can't help it when he sees Roxas again, this time without the birds, without a friend or a lantern. Roxas is dressed the same as yesterday, but now there is a sickle in his hand. It shines in the moonlight, silver and blue, with a carved black handle made of some sort of mysterious desert wood. Roxas wields it like a real farm boy, with no malice in his grip, just a tired wariness.

"Hey," says Axel, steering the Magitek armor to greet him. He's hoping that Roxas's abrupt abandonment yesterday was just a time constraint, not a snub, and he's rewarded.

"Hi," says Roxas.

"Was wonderin' if I'd see you today. Where're your feathered friends?"

Roxas looks utterly confused for a few seconds before saying "Oh! The chocobos? I don't have that tonight. I just...felt like walking."

"You always walk with weapons?"

"Yes."

Axel's honestly a little taken aback by that, though he doesn't show it (the academy actually has classes on how to hide your emotions, or cover them up with different ones. It's a creepy class taught by a creepy doctor but it's useful as hell). He takes in the way Roxas holds the sickle, and once he really thinks about it he realizes how unthreatening it is. The blade itself is terrifying – it's a cruel curve, and the sharpened edge gleams, the reflection of Axel's headlight mockingly warped on that long, sharp grin. But the hand that controls it is loose and relaxed. Axel's just biased. The kid has probably never used this thing for anything other than harvesting crops.

That's when he notices the eight-inch dagger strapped to Roxas's thigh. It's still beautiful, engraved with something he can't see from this high up, and the handle is so black it practically disappears in his pants, but it's thin and pointed and menacing in a way the sickle just isn't. It sits there quietly and stares at Axel like it's just waiting for him to try something.

Axel wets his lips. "Can I ask why?"

But Roxas, he just stares at Axel with those eyes, fine China stained with India ink and encased in glass, and he smirks and looks out at the desert, away from the tower and from the town. "You go out there," he says. "You go out in the desert alone. Don't bring nothing, just yourself. You do that and tell me you aren't scared it'll eat you up."

Axel stares at him for a while. Just stares at this kid, a stuttering mess yesterday and now standing here with sharp blond hair and a long blade, all black and white, reminding Axel with a sickening crunch to his psyche of another blond with another blade far away from here. He pulls himself out of that memory as fast as he can, because Roxas has nothing in common with that aside from hair, and he finds himself wishing those eyes were on him again.

He does, he looks at Axel with that same smile, and he spins the sickle in his hand around once in a smooth motion.

"I thought you guys weren't afraid of the desert," Axel confesses. He's much higher than this Sable native with his machine, and would probably tower over him even if they were on even ground, but he sure feels like he's shrinking. "You all dress flashy."

"Yup. If you get lost, nobody'll find you while you're wearing brown. But nothing in nature looks like this – " Roxas shakes the stripes on his hands and arms; they make grey blurs. "We stick out. Like funny little growths."

"So you're all afraid of getting lost?"

Roxas frowns. "It's a desert," he says. "I might live in it, but that doesn't mean it'll take care of me. It'll swallow me whole if I let it." He takes a step toward Axel, who watches this little desert monster with fascination. "I've seen it swallow whole buildings."

Axel clears his throat, breaks eye contact briefly, and fingers the watch around his neck. "You're sure different from yesterday," he says.

When he looks back, Roxas is just staring at the ground with his eyebrows furrowed, breathing slowly. "I'm in a funny mood," he says. Wow, that mouth. Axel's always been one for dramatic features, big eyes, strong arms, confident sweeps of noses. That mouth is small (not delicate, but small), the lips are round, not full, not pouty, not anything, even the skin is the same color as the rest of his face, but the way words fall from them and the way words shape that mouth, it's fucking art.

"I wanted to ask you something," says that mouth, and Axel jerks back to reality. It has been far too long on the military base full of men with shaven heads and really unflattering armor.

"What is it?"

"Does your language have a word, where you come from, for men who like other men?"

Axel just blinks at him, unsure whether he should believe this question is even coming out of this kid's mouth (that _mouth_, what the fuck is wrong with him today?) or if he should be immediately suspecting a trap. Either way, he just can't think straight with this jarring behavior. "Yeah," he says. "You mean sexually? We call them gays."

"Oh." Roxas nods and turns his eyes to the sickle again, holding it up to let moonlight skate along that sly curve. "I see."

"Why, what is it in your language?"

He shrugs. "We just call them people."

"Uh, can you – put the sickle down? I feel like you're about to murder me." Roxas lets the tool fall to his side again and he looks up at Axel with a funny smile.

"I'll put it down if you get out of your monster," he says gently.

After a second of stupid deliberation Axel realizes that he means the Magitek armor, the assigned Magitek armor for every private on a patrol shift so as to use intimidation before actual force, and he laughs to himself that he's sitting in the goddamn robot suit and he's the one being intimidated by a kid with a knife. "I can't do that," he says.

Roxas nods, and his grip tightens. "Then I'm sorry," he replies.

"It's called Magitek."

"What?"

"The armor. The thing you called a monster. They're called Magitek suits, and they're not alive."

"Oh. Does something have to be alive if it's a monster?"

Axel sighs, growing a little weary of this game, but unable to up and leave. He can't even suggest curtly that he has better things to do than to talk to naive little boys. And then, of course, he realizes none of those words really apply to the person in front of him. With a start, he realizes that Roxas is even wearing a black turtleneck. It's a little uncanny.

"I suppose not," he concedes.

"If you won't come down, can I go up?"

Axel just stares at him. He feels a little creepy, now. It's creepy, he thinks, to have sexual thoughts about someone who's currently acting like a five-year-old, no matter if the military has been the longest and biggest turn off of his sex life.

"Well? Can I?"

"If you put down the weapons and get up on your own you can."

He's seen native villages from the forests. He can't remember any of their names, not that they would matter anymore anyways, but their children jump around on the trees and make hammocks and scuttle around from branch to branch, and it's amazing, really it is, but damn if the little desert brat isn't just as fast and genius as they are when it comes to climbing things they shouldn't climb. In an instant he drops the sickle, slides the knife off his thigh and clambers into the belly of the beast.

There's barely enough room, of course, but Roxas is slight and Axel is used to cramped corners.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," Roxas says.

He shouldn't be doing this. He really shouldn't, oh, it's against a lot of rules, it really is. This guy is a native and this is military equipment, and every extra minute he spends talking to him Axel risks letting something slip that could get him court-marshaled, and this kid sure as hell knows his way around a sickle and probably that knife too, climbed into Magitek armor like it wasn't a deadly machine, what the **fuck** is he doing.

Maybe it's the desert. He's a redhead; they don't take too well to sunlight. And the whole place is just so big, and so empty, he believed Roxas when he talked about getting swallowed up. The desert is making him even lonelier than usual. It doesn't really help that this is his first tour of duty so far from home, either. He'll take what comfort he can get.

Then Roxas smiles at him. "I've never seen someone with red hair before," he says.

"They ain't that common. Besides me and my brother, I've only ever met a few."

"I know. It's a recessive trait. I just..." his eyes trail upwards, staying on the mane of red hair of which Axel's really quite proud. "I've heard of it, but I never imagined it would be so _red._"

"Thanks, I think." Roxas laughs and scrunches up his nose, and they just look at each other for a minute on even ground. Black, and silver, and white, and blue, and sand. Those are the colors in Sable. Green and red. Roxas is fascinated, Axel can just see it, and he takes a real slow pleasure in that.

"So how does your monster work?" he asks, and reaches out _whoa there fucking immediately_ around Axel to start fiddling with the controls, which is, Axel's sure, more or less totally illegal and really very dangerous. He flicks a switch and the thing lurches sideways and swivels with a series of metallic clicks and whirs toward the tower. "Oh I swear to God kid – "

"What kind of gods do you have?" Roxas says brightly, drawing his arms back in close and not touching anything. He watches Axel mess with the controls, in out, up down, shift this and pull that with long bony fingers.

"Don't touch the controls, kid. I'm already riskin' enough trouble letting you up here," he flashes a quick grin at the blond behind him.

"I'm sorry," he says, though he reflects that smile in his own strange desert brat way.

Axel just lets that smile wash over him, and lets himself be just Axel. Not a damn appendage, a flagellum of the military. He quits thinking about the bastard he bunks with, his fucked up commanding officer, Reno's smile while he watched his little brother learn how to fight with real goddamn weapons, the family talking over his head about five years down the road Axel honey, a proud military man with a career and a wife and kids, finally delivering on that childhood promise those how many years ago –

Fuck no. Right now he's got no past and no fucking history; he's a foreigner with exotic red hair, face to face with an attractive and at _least_ bicurious native. Reno is probably the only one who would approve of this.

The kid practically does his work for him. "That word you mentioned – gays – are they...common?"

"Common enough. Why?"

Roxas doesn't say anything, just flexes his hands. Axel starts the Magitek up again, and it sloughs through the sand with mechanical groans. But it keeps to a steady course. He struggles to find something to say. "There was a whole big deal about 'em, maybe five hundred years back – you know, before uh." He grunts, because he hates saying it. "Before all that world of ruin crap."

That gets a really confusing look from the kid, but Axel keeps going. "Some people thought it was unnatural for one reason or another. Since animals aren't like that, I guess. And then obviously the people who were like that couldn't do shit about it and wanted to be able to live normally, and they won out in the end, and now it's not really unusual." He pauses, and refrains from mentioning that while it's not unusual, it's still not _good_. "Why do you ask?" he adds.

"A boy kissed me today. I thought you might know what to do."

That just hits Axel right in the face. Either fate's on his side or, he reasons, Roxas sought him out tonight _because_ of this instead of conveniently falling into his lap. But oh, damn, he doesn't sound too happy about being kissed by "a boy", does he? Axel groans inwardly.

"Really?" he asks, slowing down the Magitek to conserve fuel. He might just get back in with enough to shirk refill duty.

"You're a soldier, you come from a city in the Empire. I figured, if anyone would know, it would be you," Roxas mumbles.

"Well, do you like him?"

This is surreal.

"He's my best friend," Roxas says brokenly.

"Do you like boys, in general?"

"Yes." He sounds so sure, but then, going by his earlier comment ("We just call them people."), it's not nearly as big a deal here as it is back home. Axel grins and hides it immediately, because really, he's a good guy. He doesn't know this kid at all – at _all_ at all – for all he knows, Roxas has a good chance at a real, healthy relationship.

Well. For the next few weeks, at least.

Axel winces.

"Do you want to kiss him again?"

"I want to understand it. Love must be pretty fantastic. Even Chaos and Order fell in love, so I always thought it would feel more...important. Even just the kissing."

Axel shrugs, confused by 'chaos and order fell in love' but refusing to show it. "I dunno what to tell you. I've never met this kid and I barely know you at all."

Roxas nods, and then he puts his forehead on Axel's back, delicately. It's just this tiny little circle of pressure, meaningless, if a little strange. But oh, God, it does things to Axel's stomach that he hasn't felt in months. "Sometimes it's easier," Roxas says, "To be yourself with someone who barely knows you. They don't expect anything from you."

"True that."

He giggles against Axel's back, but Axel doesn't mind. "Do you do that on purpose? Use funny sentences?"

"A person might say you use funny sentences too, you know." He snorts. "Deserts eating people and all that."

"Axel? Private Axel?"

"Just call me Axel. If a civilian starts calling me 'private' I'm gonna shoot something. What is it?"

"What should I do?"

Fuck if it matters, kid. This is gonna seem like the most hilariously small problem in the world for you pretty soon. Axel sighs and, with that in mind, decides to throw caution to the wind and just say whatever he feels like. "Do you have _romantic_ thoughts about this kid?"

The pressure on his back rocks back and forth. "I'm...not sure. Maybe."

"Does he get you hot?"

Axel stifles a snicker. At least this gets a reaction out of the weirdo. "What – what?"

"You know. Hot and bothered. Sexy. Does thinking about him – " oh, he's such a messed up fuck of a private. Axel's in all sorts of moods tonight. " – make you feel the impulsion to _give in to your primal urges_?"

Roxas blinks a few times. "You're making fun of me," he says suddenly. Coldly. A spark of malice in those gorgeous eyes.

"I am not."

"You grew up in a city. You think this is a joke. I'm dealing with all this as calmly as I know how, and you think it's funny, because my problems seem so small."

Okay, fine, Axel tells himself, trying to back into the other end of the very small cockpit of the armor. He's a cute little desert brat who's a good fucking guesser.

"I'll tell you something," Roxas says, leaning in toward Axel really, really close, "I'll tell you something. I've seen the world begin and end more times than you've _breathed_ in this desert. Maybe I never took the time to learn your social conventions, but that doesn't give your people the right to dismiss mine."

"Jeez, kid!" Axel is quick to leap to the defensive, maybe because Roxas has expanded the discussion to their _people_, past the individual. That makes him feel a little guilty. But he hides it; he's good at that. "Jeez, would you calm down? You're the one who came to talk to me. You're the one who said being from the Empire meant I might know what to do. Alright?"

He blinks some more, and twists his hands in his lap and just stares lot. He breathes in, really slowly, and looks back up at Axel with those eyes. There's a calm set to those eyes; they are settled so firmly in Roxas's face, and they don't shake or shine. They absorb all the light that comes into them and let it back out the same color as that silver blue shine of the sickle. Axel's positively hypnotized. "I'm sorry," he says. "You're right, you really are.

"And it's not important, is it? These sorts of things. I won't even remember this a year from now."

As for Axel – he just can't say anything, can't talk. What _happens_ in that head? He just looks that face, with a fine smile and eyes, and those words start making sense. The desert swallows up everything, doesn't it, Roxas? Even the bad things.

"You're a really strange guy," he says at last.

Roxas laughs. "You should see me when I'm calm. My mom says I act twice her age then."

"And don't I believe it."

* * *

They talk for a while about anything, nothing, about what a person does in the desert all day to wile away the time, or the exciting things that happen in a city on a daily basis. About the weather – really, the weather – and about history, and Espers (here they've all got individual names; back home they're just different types). They make a full circle and when that unforgettable glimmer in the sand comes around again, and Roxas hops out real fast.

Axel sees another guard coming towards him, and thanks his lucky stars for the timing. Perfectly innocent, other guard, look, just appeasing the natives. Haha, the silly natives. They'll never see it coming, right, other guard? Haha.

Shit.

Roxas stills when he hears that clunking noise, angry and unnatural, veering closer. He picks up his sickle, and looks at the moon very briefly before looking back in the direction of the noise, motionless. Right out there in the open. He slides the knife onto his thigh and hides the shine of the blades behind his back, and when Leo comes through, arms crossed and armor on autopilot, he doesn't hide. Roxas just stands there and watches.

Leo doesn't notice him. "Hey Ax," he says.

"...hey."

_Clank, clonk, clunk_. Bye, Leo.

No recognition. He just walks right on by Roxas, immune to that stare, or maybe because of it. He whistles to himself and looks up at the night sky, arms crossed behind his head. Roxas watches Leo with a cool fascination, with cold, curious eyes and a barely-there smile.

Roxas is...is...

...unsettling.

"Thank you for the ride," Roxas says, turning to Axel, once the other guard is out of range. "I think you must have helped me, in some way or another."

"Don't say that, kid." God, don't say that. You'll make it worse.

"Why not?"

"Just don't."

He can't make eye contact, but jumps out of the armor and onto the ground all the same, just to prove he can. It's the first time he's really truly set foot on the sand – the base is all concrete and steel, and he always gets into the armor before going out to patrol. He'd gotten here after the grunt work, the mindless tedium of setting shit up. Oh, no, of course he did. Son of the _commander_. He only gets to come in for the _fun part_. He would rather have it the other way around.

"Whoa," he says.

"What is it?"

"Walking on sand feels shit weird is what it is," Axel says, rocking back and forth on his heels with little success. "How the fuck do you do it?"

"Fuck?"

Axel splutters. "W- no, jeez, kid, I'm pretty sure _that_ doesn't change between cultures – "

"Oh. That's what it means." Roxas seems a little disappointed it's something so crude, but Axel doesn't feel too apologetic. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and steps a little closer. "Wait. You've been here this whole time, and you never touched the sand?"

"Didn't say I never touched it. It gets fuckin' everywhere. Just never walked on it." He takes a few more steps, circles Roxas. He imagined that his footprints would stick in the sand, engraved there, but he just leaves little dents that cave in on themselves.

"That's awful."

"Why?"

"It's so fun. It's how I imagine the ocean might be, if you could make it into the ground. It wouldn't ever really stop moving, so it would be like this, almost solid, but not really."

"You ain't never seen the ocean, have you?"

"Is it that obvious?"

Axel laughs and claps him on the shoulder; Roxas lurches forward and stumbles a little before righting himself. "It is, kid. You can't ever talk about the ocean going solid once you've seen it."

"Oh."

He's feeling stupid for saying that, and Axel considers going all out with it. He thinks about this kid's nervousness about kissing a guy, his indecision. He briefly toys with the idea of kissing Roxas with that hungry fire in his belly, spread the flame to this strange desert soul, show the kid what a _real_ kiss was like and why he should have _no_ hesitation about something like this. But he'd feel stupid for doing that, even if he did succeed it leaving Roxas dumbfounded.

But he's already lost his chance for the last word. Roxas takes it right from him.

"Axel?" he says, getting real close and looking up, half his face hidden in a shadow.

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you want me to thank you for helping me?"

Axel gulps and tries to look away, but he doesn't. "None of your business."

"Axel?"

"_What_?"

Roxas smiles at him. A tiny little thing, stretched out small and delicate over that mouth. So fragile. He smiles and he says, "It'll be okay, you know."

Axel just – he just – stares.

"What?"

Two hands, one on either side of his face, those bright calm eyes on nothing but him. Axel doesn't know anything about Roxas. He wants to tell him everything.

"It will be okay," Roxas repeats. His voice is so, so soft. "I know it doesn't seem like that. And it'll be bad for a long time, I know that too. It'll be really bad, for a really long time. But you'll be okay. Everything will be okay."

They don't even know anything about each other. If it were any other situation Axel would punch the dickhead telling him "it will be okay" and tell him that if he needed a _mommy_ he would've stayed in Kohlingen, but here, now, after coming from that meeting and seeing those – those huge – _things_ in the storeroom, he's never needed it and hated it more in his life.

"You shouldn't say shit like that," Axel says. "It only gets more depressing when it isn't true."

"It is true, though. Sometimes it's right around the corner and sometimes it's twenty years from now, but it always comes." A cool, small hand strokes the side of Axel's face. This is so fucking creepy and wrong but he can't pull away. "I know these things."

"You don't know everything," and this time it's Axel who sounds broken, who bends over practically in half to rest his head on Roxas's shoulder. This is so fucking creepy. He doesn't even know this kid. What the fuck is he doing. He can't stop. What is this place _doing_ to him? "You don't know what – " he stops himself. "What might happen."

"No," Roxas admits. "But I still know this."

Very gently, he removes Axel from his shoulder, and smiles and picks up his sickle (when did he drop that? Axel's so out of it), and he leaves without a word again.

* * *

A/N: Ahaha remember when I could write? Yeah me neither. This is fun!

I have five new fish. Anyone have any clever names?


	3. Storm

A/N: Announcement!

This story is moving to another account, and I named the other account **_Thorichthys_**. It'll stay up on this one until I have chapter four, at which point I'll upload chapter four to that account and delete the story from this one.

But Nitlon! you may cry, outraged at such an unnecessary change to such a hard-to-spell pen name, Why would you do such a thing!

Well, imaginary reader, it's mostly because I dislike clutter, and also because I feel like it.

That...would also explain most of this story.

* * *

Roxas can't sleep. He can't stop thinking and he can't sleep. Every time he closes his eyes he finds something else to worry about, or remembers something he found before. Axel. Hayner. The tower. School. Farm work. Olette. The chocobos. Chaos. The tower. Axel. The tower. The armor. Axel. The tower.

He's starting to act like his mother, he thinks. He's starting to act like her and saying when he feels something even if it makes no sense; he's turning strange.

Little lights drift across the ceiling in an aimless stream, powered by a childhood toy he's reluctant to throw out. He imagines hitching one of those worries to every light and letting them be pulled away like a worry train, but it doesn't work.

What are they doing? That tower, that big black tower? Are they training troops? If they're training troops in harsh conditions, why hadn't Axel ever set foot on the sand? He would think that would be the point of coming to the desert. Learning to fight in the sand. But they aren't doing that, or at least, Axel isn't. What else could they want? There's nothing in the desert.

Nothing.

Roxas tries to use all the tools at his disposal, the things in his mind. He's always imagined the battle between Chaos and Order to be rather one-sided. Chaos does whatever he feels like and Order's there, watching, hurrying along behind the mess and cleaning up what he can, trying to prevent the disasters and sitting there, begging Chaos to please let this one live.

He feels sick. He rolls around to be belly-up, then belly-down and pressed against his bed, shifting his thin sheet over his shoulders and down past his waist. None of it works. With a helpless groan, he shoves his pillow and blanket to the side and gets up, heading for the bathroom. Down the stairs, around the corner, through the corridor that smells like dust and candles and steamed rice, and close the door behind you. Roxas puts his hot palms on the bathroom sink and stares at his reflection in the mirror. He frowns. With big eyes, a little leftover baby fat, round cheeks, and a small frame, he's not the picture of manliness he hoped to be at nearly eighteen. But, well. He's him. He can't help how he is.

Not bothering to dwell on his appearance, he turns on the cold water and runs his hands under it. Ah. Better, that feels better. He splashes his face, can feel the heat being assuaged, his hair getting a little damp. He looks back at his reflection. He leans in close and – and really _looks _at himself, makes the person in the mirror different from the mind inside his head.

"Stop worrying," he tells himself. "You're being ridiculous. Nothing has changed. Go to sleep."

Well, nothing has changed aside from him talking to himself in the mirror now, apparently, but he hasn't got the time to worry about that. He snorts and shakes his head, spraying a few errant water droplets onto the sink, and turns out the lights to go back to bed.

But back in bed is hardly better. He thinks about Axel. Axel, who smells like smoke, who's so tall and gangly he should be awkward. Axel has a sharp chin and unreal eyes. He's pointy and defined with mathematical precision, and he slithers underneath his skin, fluid and dangerous.

And Roxas can see it: Axel knows something, they all know something they won't tell the silly natives. He can't blame the man, really – he'd be reluctant, too. He's seen enough foreigners to know that they wrap their cultures around them like armor, believe in the inferiority of the Other. There's very little common ground between them. Roxas's behavior must seem awfully strange. Herding birds and climbing up armor and asking odd questions.

Roxas likes the effect he has on Axel. The man stands cocky, even on the sand he swung his hips and his hands with a confident sway, and those glass green eyes never wavered. So Roxas sort of likes it, the way that Axel looks at him. He's not sure what it means, that look, but he likes how it feels to have important foreign soldier eyes on his face. Axel is familiar ideas in an unfamiliar setting. He's danger, he's foreign, he's secretive, he's hungry. The desert is all of these things. But the desert doesn't look at him like that.

He groans and kicks off the sheets, which have only exaggerated the damp sweatiness of his legs. He'll go onto the roof, where it's cold. So freezing in the desert at night.

* * *

The view of the desert from this high up is...nothing short of breathtaking. The same blue comes every night, washed out from so many uses but still dark, a thin sheet, a coat that spreads over the dunes and the sky. Or maybe it seeps from the pores of the sand, this blueness, this darkness that casts long waving shadows. The moon is timid as ever, though when wind draws out long strings of sand from the tops of the dunes it breathes light, luminous sprays that settle down and rise again to make their way across the desert.

Of course, Roxas hadn't counted on his mother being up here. But he doesn't know why he's surprised. She's never been quite capable of acting like a normal human being, not that she tries very hard.

She's sitting on the flat part of the roof, facing away from the tower and the town with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap. She's wearing a white shirt, and black pants; her dirty blond hair is up in a scraggly ponytail. "Roxas?" Of course she doesn't turn around to see him, or anything. She just knows. She's like that.

"Hi, Mom."

With a calculating glance over her shoulder, his mother frowns at him. "What're you doing up? You should be in bed by now."

"Un," Roxas grunts, shoving his hands in his pockets and coming to stand behind her. "Couldn't sleep."

"I sympathize," she says softly. She turns her head back to the desert and shifts her hands to her knees.

"Can I sit down too?"

"Of course you can." He does, he kneels next to her and slouches forward lazily.

Roxas's mother is bookish; she has two sets of encyclopedias, and on top of that she's got reference books on everything from subatomic particles to one devoted entirely to the legend of Sin, the city-destroying monster from cheesy Zanarkand folk tales. She just loves to _know _things, to make connections between a culture a thousand clicks away and four hundred years old and here now in Sable, to point out the similarities in all the stories and the people and the history. It's like she's trying to stitch the world together with ideas. But then, she's always trying to fix things.

They're silent for a while, together. His mother has this wonderful capacity for silence. She fills up whole rooms with it, a light, cloaking thing that invites you to close your eyes, to grow still, to just be. She's not much in the way of a mother – she hardly ever fusses – and she's hardly a woman. She wears man clothing, she's gotten a little fat with age. But still, he's glad of her, and the way she always seems to know what to say. He hopes to be like that when he's that old. To set someone's mind at ease with a few cryptic words, to have hands that are small and warm and dry, to know how to spark a burning wonder in somebody's eyes.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"...nothing, never mind," he retreats. Wind blows their hair to the right, and in the distance the very top of a sand dune is slowly shaved.

His mother frowns and closes her eyes, rubbing her forefinger against her thumb. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Roxas."

He feels his mouth twist and he narrows his eyes, like closing up his face will keep her from seeing his thoughts. He's grateful that his mom can tell when he's upset, and she can usually see the difference between teen moodiness and something actually wrong, but it doesn't mean he wants to tell her. He just wants to sit up here and watch the sand blow.

"Tell me. Appease your old lady."

"Mom..."

She opens her eyes and turns her head. A mother can do that, just stare at you until you say something. She never snaps first, and she doesn't this time, either.

"I don't know...what it is exactly," he admits. "I mean I don't think it's only one thing."

"It's a bunch of little things?"

He seems so small, and the moon seems so far away. Sometimes up on the roof Roxas realizes how insignificant Sable is. It's here that all those myths start to make sense and start to be real. Hard to ignore that feeling of immenseness here, surrounded by the wind where the sand goes on forever.

No matter what Axel says. It is like an ocean, Roxas's desert. It swells and falls in blue light. It shimmers under the moon.

"Yeah," he says. "It's...a bunch of little things."

"Tell me one."

"The tower." The words come out before he can stop them, and before he can even think them.

His mother shuffles a bit closer to him, still keeping her eyes on the horizon. "Does it frighten you?"

Roxas shakes his head.

"Good."

"Why is that good?"

"Human beings tend to make it a habit to be scared of things they don't understand. Things that are very powerful." There's that funny quality to his mom's voice again, like she's off in her two sets of encyclopedias.

"Is it powerful, do you think? The tower."

"Yes," she nods. "He won't be able to keep them happy much longer, you know."

"Who?"

No reply.

"Mom?"

"Nothing, Rox. Don't worry about it. C'mere," she reaches out and puts an arm over his shoulders, making him lean against her warmth. She rubs her hand up and down. "I love you." She doesn't usually like touching people, even Dad, even her own son, and it makes Roxas feel...funny.

"Mom?"

"What else, besides the tower?"

Well, my best friend kissed me today and I can't stop thinking about the foul-mouthed soldier with green eyes. "...nothing specific, really," he says. But he's getting antsy. He has a feeling, he has a very bad feeling and it won't go away. He can't name it, or say where it comes from – but it has settled in his belly, small, round and perfect. A strange and foreign pressure.

"Yeah, me too," she says. "Me too."

He turns his head to look at her, his eyes wide and a vice around his heart getting twisted a little bit more. "Mom? Are...are _you _alright?"

That just makes her laugh, and rub his arm a little bit more, and kiss the crown of his head. "I'm always fine, sweetie. Nothing gets to your mom. All of Sable could start falling apart in front of me and I wouldn't move till I was good and ready."

Roxas snorts. "You're so weird," he mutters.

"And I'm the one raising you," she says with a light smack to his temple. "Guess you're screwed, Rox."

"Mom? Everything – Sable's fine, right?" When she doesn't reply, he nudges her in the side. "There's nothing wrong with it."

"Hmm," she says.

"Mom," he says, a little more forcefully.

She removes her arm from his shoulders and cups his face in her hands. She keeps their eyes together, a direct line between them. Though her skin is mottled and his is resistant to the desert sun, her nose is round where his is narrow, her face full and his pointed – he takes after his father – they have the same eyes. Different colors. But the same eyes. "I guess we'll have to see," she grins.

He pulls away. "Quit it, _Unma,"_ he says_._

She doesn't seem fazed, just pats him on the cheek and stands up to go back. "Everything will be fine. Don't I always say so? Have a little faith in your _unma."_

* * *

After that conversation, Roxas can hardly stay on the roof any longer, and clambers down the ladder to the ground. At this time of night – or early morning, now, he can just barely see the horizon start getting lighter – it's not like anybody is going to be around. He can go anywhere he wants.

Roxas has a hard time believing in stories about people getting robbed or murdered because they're alone at night; Sable doesn't really have shady characters lurking in alleyways. They don't even have paved roads. He thinks that vagabonds, like snow, are an exaggeration of books for the sake of exciting stories.

So he hasn't got a problem with going to walk around in the middle of the night, but he has got a problem deciding where to go. Anywhere in Sable and he might wake someone up, but he's scared to go toward the tower or alone into the desert when nobody might notice him getting lost for hours.

Eventually he just up and heads for the stables, content that a sleeping chocobo can't possibly be worse than one that was awake, and makes his way there. The best way to run on sand is a light jog: if you walk too slow, the sand has time to cave in over your foot, but if you run too fast you hit it too hard and get stuck. Tip of the toes, tip of the sand, that's what Mom says. He can't take the time to look at the stucco buildings with wind-roughened glass windows, or the daycare center covered in finger paintings (their purple stick dog, Hayner would never let him forget, was the first sign of their_ epic friendship_). If he stops too long he'll sink and get sand in his shoes.

"Chikky chikky chikky," he says, opening the latch to get into the stable. A sleepy bird near the entrance lifts its head to look at him with one open eye.

"Hey, pretty boy," he greets it. The bird cocks its head to the side briefly and then drops its head again to go back to sleep. "Oh," he says, "Not cool."

It smells so...consistent in the stables. A heady mix of dung, and grainy feed, and discarded feathers or dried plant scraps used to line the cages. It smells like farm and domestication, but he's used to it.

"Brrk," says another bird a few stalls down. He heads for the noise, footfalls getting absorbed noiselessly. The sand in here is packed down tight with no wind to blow it around.

It's a black bird, probably no more than a year old with those telltale huge eyes and unwieldy wings. "Hi," says Roxas. "You can't sleep either?"

The bird blinks. "I see," he says. He leans his elbows on the divider to look down at it. "What's bothering you, then? Girl birds too chatty? Not enough rice in the feed? Water always lukewarm?"

It must think he wants something, because the chocobo stands up and takes a step to the side, shifting its weight from leg to leg. Roxas laughs. "Sorry, man, no can do. You'll get to run around soon. You're a nice color, too. Who knows? Maybe a traveler'll pick you up to sell in a big city. That guy from Tzen told me you're used in official ceremonies. How's that, huh? Stupid desert tribes did something right, didn't they?"

The chocobo, being a bird, soon realizes that nothing Roxas is doing will result in food, so sits back down. Roxas doesn't pay it much heed.

"The thing that freaks me out," he says. "Is that my whole life so far would be a sentence in Sable myth. 'At first the villagers lived happily in isolation, until one day a tower appeared on the horizon.' That's it. The tower started to send out soldiers and Hayner, who had never been content with the quiet life of the country, went to go find out what was happening. He became their spy when he discovered that the evil men in the tower wanted to steal all of Sable's chocobos for ceremonial purposes." The chocobo gives him a look.

"Yeah, you're probably right. I should stick to just reading the stories."

"Roxas?"

"Birds don't talk. Stop making me hallucinate, black chocobo."

"Oh good. Somebody broke you," says Hayner, yawning and coming into view from around the corner.

"See? Hayner was the one talking. You can't fool me, black chocobo," Roxas says sagely, and turns to face his friend.

Hayner laughs and leans against the stall next to him, crossing his arms. "Why're you out here anyways?"

"Couldn't sleep. You?"

"You come out to the _stables _when you can't sleep? You're such a loser."

"I don't hear an excuse about _you_ being here," Roxas says.

"You're a loud runner," is all Hayner offers in response.

He slides his back down the stall and sits on the ground. Roxas joins him. "Hey, um..."

"Yeah?" He knows what Hayner's going to ask, but he waits for it anyways. But he's never thought it would be...like this.

"Remember that...conversation we had?" Hayner seems nervous, sliding his tongue around in his mouth and tapping his foot against the ground.

"Yesterday? Yeah, I do."

"Man, I'm shit at this," he laughs. He can't stop tapping his foot, looks like. "It's a good thing you've already seen me at my worst."

Roxas puts a hand on his knee, in part to calm him and in part to quell the shaking. The poor boy is a wreck, but from Roxas's end it's hardly anything of importance. So people kissed. So what? Nothing came of it, not ever. Here, at least, this story cannot end in a baby.

"Just out and say it, _poyo,_" he tells Hayner.

"Now you're just making words up."

"Always. What is it?"

The words of that soldier flash through Roxas's mind: _does he make you wanna **give in **to your**primal urges?**_

What...urges? He hasn't felt anything before, and he doesn't feel anything now. Hayner will like him no matter what, romance or no romance.

"So are we, uh...you know," Hayner says.

Roxas licks his lips and ticks through all the responses he wants to give. "Yeah," he says. _If you want._

As if he can tell how far out of their comfort zone he's pulled them, Hayner laughs and turns to normal things like school and food and chocobo racing, and how the first-schoolers are starting to hatch lizard eggs for a project. And it's fine like this, for a while. And then Hayner kisses him again, on the mouth, and coaxes his lips apart a little and Hayner's – Hayner's lips are a little dry, which Roxas has always suspected to be the case – and okay, there's a little spit on the side of his mouth, but they're kids. They'll figure out how to do it right. Hayner kissing him makes Roxas feel warm inside, cozy, like he'll be the lover left behind when Hayner goes on all his adventures. The person Great Hero Hayner will write home to and think about on lonely nights.

He wraps his arms around his neck and forces the kiss deeper.

* * *

Nobody's asleep at the base. At least, nobody who _counts. _The sun has yet to rise, but here they are.

Luxord's looped the bunk into another round of poker, though they don't have anything but working pens and various personal hygiene effects to use for chips, and Axel chews absently on a toothpick. He's always had an addictive personality. Doesn't really care to add gambling to the list, so he just watches.

He's always trying to find the liars, though every one he spots is based more or less on intuition. He wouldn't even know that people had tells if Luxord hadn't said so to his face. Is blinking a tell? Everybody blinks, though.

Grunting, Xaldin tosses his cards face up on the table and shoves a box of matches toward Luxord, who only grins and tips an imaginary hat.

"Hey, Ax, you okay?"

Demyx's bunk is separated from Axel's by a ladder which leads up to the second tier, and the blond's got his fingers hooked onto the rungs. His face is probably the most earnest thing Axel's ever seen. Tan and teal and dirty blond, with a little purple circle tattooed on his shoulder – vibrant, and present and loud.

Axel figures he doesn't just have a thing for blonds, because nothing about Demyx really attracts him. That's probably what makes him a good guy to hang around. That and it's helpful to be friends with a medic.

"I'm fine, yeah," he says. "Why do you ask?"

Demyx shrugs. "You're just quiet. By this time of day I'm used to tuning out you complaining about all the sand in your ass."

A swift punch to the shoulder is Axel's predictable revenge, but Dem just laughs it off and keeps talking. "Oh – oh man, so me and Lux were doing the supplies inventory today, right? So we were checking out the pressure cans – "

"What?"

"You know, the compressed air canisters. That's what I'm telling you. They're like, they're so not canisters, man. They look so stupid. They're these big oblong tube things and they're pointy at one end. They look like old-timey rockets or some shit. But I guess you just fire them at the ground and they – "

"I know what an air canister does, moron," Axel says.

"Well jeez. If you're gonna be Bitchpants McCrabby about it, then _I'm _not gonna talk to you." With a huff, Demyx crosses his arms and sits pretzel-style facing the corner.

"Oh no. Come back. My life is so empty without you."

Axel laughs and comes around the ladder to flop down on Demyx's bunk, his feet hanging over the edge of the bed. Demyx lies down with his head on Axel's belly. "Giggle game," he says.

"You're such a fucking five-year-old."

"What, you wanna play _poker?"_

"Have you had patrol duty yet?"

That makes Demyx sit up, leaning on one hand to look down at the redhead. "No. Why?"

"No reason."

"That was so random. There's got to be a reason." He grins, because he knows Axel so well, and takes pride in all their secrets.

"There's not." A pause. "Did you know there was a town out there? In the sand?"

The perpetual smile on Demyx's face falters a little. For a moment, only the triumphant hoot of Luxord is audible in the background. Xaldin mumbles something, cards get shuffled. "No," he says. "I...didn't." He slumps against the wall. "A town? Where a bunch of people live, right out there?"

Demyx can always tell when Axel is lying. He can always, always tell.

"No," Axel says. "I mean, it used to be, but it's abandoned now. It's just empty buildings."

"That makes sense. I can't imagine anybody living out here in one place all the time, since the sand's always moving." Demyx nods and scratches his nose. No. They wouldn't let him out to see. First tour of duty and all. "Are you sure you're okay? You seem. I dunno. Weirdly serious."

"Yeah. The army's kind of fucking with my head." He groans, rubbing a hand across his face. "It's all these rules and stuff. It's like one person came in and went 'this is how everything's gonna be run now!' and we're all just _doing_ it without actually knowing why."

"You gotta have a little faith that the higher-ups know what they're doing." Demyx pulls a picture off the wall, a postcard his mom sent him. "The army's got to be more organized and more strict so we can all work together. I mean sometimes it's just a tool for someone who knows what he's doing and we gotta trust that."

Axel snorts. Dem is always way too freaking reasonable for receiving irrational rants. If you tell him something that pisses you off he'll try and see the other side of the argument. Well-balanced emotionally sound dickhead.

"When did you get _smart_?" he whines. "That's not fair. I want stupid Demyx back so I can be a smartass again! And you always agreed with the stupid shit I said."

"Look on the bright side, Red," he rolls over to put his elbows on Axel's solar plexus. "At least we're not in a war. We're actually helping."

Axel opens his mouth to respond, but before he can a shout blasts through the doorway.

"Awright, ladies! Up and at 'em! Shower rooms are open for the next half hour!" Colonel Xigbar screeches, shooing privates and captains alike out of the bunks and down the hallway. He stops in front of their room. "Oi. Where is everyone?"

"Luxord kicked everybody out of here to play his contraband – "

"Hey!"

"...game of Go Fish," Demyx finishes.

"Like I give a shit. Get in the shower room." The five people sitting on the floor don't even bother hiding their cards, and Demyx rolls off of Axel's stomach. "Pick up the pace, ladies, time's-a runnin' out," Xigbar says as they all shuffle into the hallway, joining a streaming line of peers in a million shades of grey-green.

Xig stands out in sharp black. His hair's streaked with stress, more than age. A missing eye and a shimmering scar all down the left side of his body only add to his credence – Colonel Xigbar is the epitome of a soldier, morals pried loose by years of learning not to question orders.

"Hurry it up, don't stop to talk to yer buddies. Get in, get naked, and don't drop the soap!" he cackles, slapping Demyx on the shoulder.

"Oh, Xig, honey, not while we're at work!" Demyx coos.

Axel makes the mistake of laughing, which draws Xigbar's attention. He whispers something to the blond and hangs back in the river of people until Axel catches up with him.

"I heard you been on patrol duty a lot," he says, falling into pace with his subordinate.

"Yeah? So've a lot of people."

"A lot of people ain't been talking to little native monkeys."

Axel trains his eyes on the feet in front of him, standard army-issue combat boots with heavy rubber treading. Clip-clop. He wonders what Xigbar's game is, because of all people, the colonel isn't exactly uptight. "So? I didn't tell him anything."

"This is your first tour, isn't it?" Everybody's crowded around the doors to the shower room, mutters cascading backwards in eager anticipation of getting clean. Xigbar's got the keys. Axel suddenly feels a whole lot more eyes on him.

"Yeah..."

"So be careful, is all. Don't go getting attached. The last thing I need on my hands is another freakin' bleeding heart."

"I know that."

"We move at dawn, day after tomorrow. You know that, too?"

Axel flinches.

"Have your flirty-ass fun, just remember the cardinal rule of dealing with natives." He fishes a thick brass ring of keys out of his pocket – there was a master key, but Xigbar was distrustful – and starts to make his way through the throng.

"What's that?"

"Don't put your dick in one."

Xigbar's still laughing after everybody's made their way to the changing room. He'd been waiting to use that one; Axel can just tell.

* * *

Still, Axel muses, shrugging out of his jumper and sticking it in a pile on top of his armor, Xigbar's got a point. It must be a big problem, lonely soldiers and loose native women. They're given time off-duty, after all. There wasn't much to do in the middle of the desert, but he imagined in a better place like on the coast or in the forest, the men must be tempted to go wandering. Midnight rendezvous had probably produced more than a few troublesome love children. And more than a few entitled women.

But why is he even thinking about this? He may be a little new, but he's not stupid, and he isn't getting attached or anything.

The shower room is a funky invention, and Axel's never seen one outside the military. Instead of individual showerheads the entire ceiling's rigged up; jets of water shoot out at regular intervals on a grid.

Of course, this means a bunch of muscled naked men all just standing around aimlessly with no distinct barriers, so there's that. Maybe if Axel were a little shyer he'd have the decency to be embarrassed, but he's really got the opposite problem. Not _everyone _in the military swings that way, even if Shinra tends to attract a certain type.

"Hey, Ax, mind if I borrow your stuff? I forgot mine," Demyx says, having already gotten into the spray. He's holding a bottle of clear and scentless shampoo.

"Sure, whatever," he says. Axel steps under the water and flares his nostrils. He's all too glad for the steam – water sticks together in little rivers down your skin, but steam gets everywhere. He wonders how the natives take baths – he knows they've got espers for irrigation, but maybe the actual people took dust baths like their precious birds.

He knows that the water allocated for the base is carefully rationed; not even the NCOs get private shower times. A quick flash of silver lets him know General Sephiroth's over in the corner, probably flanked by his froofy entourage so nobody sees his priceless jewels. How anyone could look like Sephiroth did, with hair that long, and still cut an imposing figure was beyond Axel.

But he's not much in the mood for showers now. The heat and the wetness and the proximity all strike him as unappealing. Some combination of _I don't need another freakin' bleeding heart _and_We move the day after tomorrow _makes the heat burn, or works its way into his lungs and clogs them up.

He doesn't bother to use any shampoo – just soaps up and washes down, and heads for the lockers. Demyx grabs his arm, though they're both slippery. "Hey," he says. "Everything okay?"

A tightness in his chest is Axel's only warning to get out of here _now, _before he has some kind of fit. "Everything's fine," he says. "I don't know how you bitches can stand around in all this hot water when it's already so hot outside, that's all."

Demyx screws up his nose.

"What?" Axel says, angling his hips toward the lockers.

"Just...don't run so fast," he says. "The tiles're pretty slick from all the stuff going down the drains."

"Duh."

* * *

He only barely feels like he can breathe now, outside, his shirt unbuttoned and hair tied back with a tight black cord. Wind-blown grains of sand peck at his exposed skin, and he watches his own bony chest rise and fall in the dim light, the shower steam condensing and rolling down in beads.

The sun is half up; he can see a villager chasing around a herd of birds, probably to exercise them. Roxas is nowhere to be found. Axel figures that's a good thing – he'll never see the kid again.

This is the last chance he'll have at privacy in the next few days. The time around an Operation is tense. Nervousness, fidgeting, anxious men bouncing in their boots to quash their moral qualms for another month – Standard Operating Procedure, Axel supposes.

And promptly after breakfast, security will be beefed up, the air canisters lovingly unpacked, a brave speech made, the clearing done in an hour, and everyone will joke about how easy it was at dinner.

"You're always in the places I'm walking," says Roxas.

"_Hein_! Fucking hell, kid!" Axel jerks back to see the boy climbing over the crest of a nearby dune to sit on it. It's a funny thing to notice, but his shirt is unbuttoned, too.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you."

"Yeah, well." He sniffs and stuffs his hands in his pockets. "You move real quiet on the sand."

"Most of the larger predators have good hearing. It helps to walk on the middle of your foot, with your toes spread out."

"Super."

"It really is," Roxas grins. "You people always walk so loud, with your heads down. It must be good for crowded places, but here it'll get you eaten." He sets his forearms on his knees, and the sunrise laps at his face and turns it red.

Axel scowls and shivers a bit. "You quiet-walk your way past the marked barrier?"

Glancing back at the barbed-wire fence twenty or so meters away, Roxas just shrugs. "It's a fence," he says. "It wasn't too hard to avoid. I figured it was there as a symbol more than anything else."

"It's there to keep out people who've got no business here," Axel says, quietly, wishing the kid would head on home to be with his family. He should be there. He is too close to – everything, to the time of Operation, to the base, to Axel's guts. His eyes wander to places they don't belong, and they stick to Axel's mind like burrs, sneaking into the base.

He snaps open the pocket watch around his neck. Thirty-two minutes.

"You should go," he says. "I mean it."

Roxas squirms, and his face twitches a little. "I did something wrong."

"No," Axel can't resist assuaging the worry. "But you have to go."

"Go where?"

That comes like a punch to the gut – he doesn't know, does he? He can't possibly _know_. It would be a good question if he knew. Roxas screws up his nose, just like Demyx does, and says "I don't want to go back for now. Hayner's being too nice to me. I don't feel like a human being."

"Tch," Axel says. "Join the club."

"What?" He heard Axel just fine, but he tilts his head to the side with a half-smile, ready to listen. "Are boys too nice to you, too?"

"You could...say that."

"Oi. Private."

A deep coldness floods his belly. An icy snake wave slithers through his heart, washes the sand out of his nostrils, freezes his hands. _The last thing I need on my hands is another freakin' bleeding heart._

"Colonel – it's alright, sir, I was about to send him back. He just wandered in," Axel says, not daring to look Xigbar in the eye.

"It's not a fruit warehouse, Private."

"Yessir, I know that."

Roxas doesn't seem at all perturbed by the intrusion – he sits calmly on his desert, knees bent and arms crossed, smiling. For all his big talk and shiny ways, the kid doesn't seem to have the first clue about the seriousness of the situation. Xigbar jokes, but it's a thin defense. A man with a good sense of humor doesn't get that much grey hair before forty-five.

He takes a few steps forward, feet close together, half-dressed in a stark black bodysuit and knives.

"If it's a problem – " Roxas winces, and stands up and backs away a bit. "I didn't learn anything. We were just talking about the village, not about – whatever you're doing here – "

"That's cute, Blondie," says Xigbar. "And I believe you, I really do." He smiles, warm and fatherly, with his open palms on his hips. Roxas has gone from calm to anxious, and he keeps his eyes in a direct line to Xigbar's face. He must have remembered that not all soldiers are as friendly as Axel is, or pretends to be; he must have remembered that bald NCO marching his minions on the concrete.

Xigbar purses his lips. He looks down, pulls a real beauty of a silver gun out of its holster, and weighs it in his hands. He checks the magazine and runs his fingertips almost lovingly over the muzzle. "...however," he adds.

"Colonel – "

"I'm talkin' here, Pippy Longstocking."

"He's telling the truth – " a barrel in his face shuts Axel up real good. His eyes travel down the arm holding it, up the ropey pink scar, to his eye and the oldness there.

"Listen, Axel. Axel, Axel, Axel. You're adorable, Red. Always with the witty comebacks. And that 'got it memorized' bullshit – really cute. But you don't get to make judgment calls until one of your men dies because you trusted an outsider. Clear?"

Before he can answer, Xigbar swings around and points the gun at Roxas, who has stupidly not moved an inch. "Come here."

Axel has to wonder: how did Roxas think he would act at gunpoint? Axel wants to think he'd be brave, but in that second just now, he clung to Xigbar's every word. Roxas doesn't fair much better. He fists his hands by his sides, eyes wide, and glances behind him then back as if to say, _Me?_

"Please don't," he says. His voice shakes. A little sound in the back of Axel's head echoes him. _Come on, Xigbar, please don't, please, please don't._

"Hey," Xigbar says. He does not lower his hand, but his voice becomes quiet. "I'm no monster, yeah? I'm not naive. I do what needs doing. But no more bodies on that pile than there's got to be. Alright?" The click when he unlocks the safety says volumes more than his words. "Nobody here thinks you're a threat, okay, kiddo? But you gotta come over here. SOP, you know, nothing I can do. You trespass, you go to the clink. A few hours and some stale bread. Honest."

"Tch," Axel scoffs, looking off to the side.

Roxas watches that, and he turns to Xigbar. "You don't mean that."

"I might. I'll try to," he says, but the barrel of his gun follows Roxas stumbling down the dune. As soon as the kid's close enough, he grabs him by the forearm, rough and strong against such a frail limb, and puts the gun up against the base of his spine. Axel watches with silent unease, and tries to button up his shirt.

"A-Axel?"

He's a coward. He wasn't a coward in Kohlingen, when he punched out a guy holding him at knifepoint; he wasn't a coward during training, when he half-carried a broken Demyx back from a practice mission in a mud field. But deep inside him, Axel is a coward, and he looks away while Roxas gets taken.

* * *

A day later he plants his feet in the sand, toes spread, pressure on the middle of his foot. He keeps a tight grip on the pole of the Absorbiflex sheeting. It forms an airtight perimeter; to him, the thing looks like a circular tennis net made out of trash bags.

He's strangely calm. This is always the worst part, but while it's happening, he can hardly feel a thing – he understands what Demyx means. It's easier to think of yourself as the finger of an enormous hand. You can't change what's happening because you're not making the decisions.

In the center of the ring, Kadaj's black coat becomes a person, then an oval, then a shimmering black line by the well in the town square. He's the fastest of Sephiroth's cronies.

In the Imperial Territory Corps, there are air guns, air canisters, and wind bombs. There are other things, too.

But those three are exclusive to the ITC, because they have such a vanishingly simple purpose: abiotic devastation. If you clear out the living, it'll vaporize the rest, which doesn't do much good for the proper army, where the whole idea is the destruction of the other guys. But here – perfect.

This will be Axel's third time going through it.

It's funny, though. In the forest, and back by the coast, the dust was so obvious afterwards. A charcoal grey powder dusted the trees and the animals. Here – _fwoom._ A rolling, low-set cloud radiates from the well and sucks whole buildings into its emptiness. He feels a deep rumble when the thing hits the Absorbiflex, and his arms shake, then it's over. You can't even see the powder in the leftovers. Just blends right into the sand.

Demyx stands behind him, on call in case the wind bomb touches living flesh. He's calm, not the way Axel's calm – more permanent. He isn't searching the sand for a sign that a city stood here, six hours ago bustling with people and birds.

Hey, Axel.

Not even a piece of wall left, not a stone or a stable.

You okay, man?

Red.

Talk to me.

* * *

_End of prologue._


End file.
